Matt Jones
Post Ten
“Animated Nightmares: Jan Svankmajer and Stop-Motion
Animation
Czech animator Jan
Svankmajer is a brilliant animator, whose work is at the same time satirical,
nightmarish, and wonderous.
A) Rather than summarize the whole of Ch. 8 in Furniss’ Art
in Motion, I have decided to focus on one portion of the reading. I have admired the work of Jan Svankmajer for
quite some time and I feel this is a perfect time to discuss his brilliant yet
troubling work.
Furniss describes Svankmajer’s work as horrorific,
yet he never blatantly attempts to be so.
His films do not feature explicit gore, nor do they offer chilling
glimpses into the world of the supernatural or the paranormal. Instead, his films seem to delve into the
horrifying landscapes of our nightmares, making them truly unsettling rather
than simply scary as most horror films are.
For this reason I always consider Svankmajer at the forefront of horror
directors for his ability to create images that unsettle the viewer to their
very core.
However, horror is not the whole of Svankmajer’s
oeuvre. He was adept at creating
symbolic texts that sublimate the dominant ideology of the communist regimes
that ruled over his art. His texts were
not understood by his would-be censors, and thus he was able to cast his
message out and reach a wide audience without being overtly against the
regime.
Svankmajer’s major trait was his use of stop-motion
animation on inanimate objects. His
reasoning being that objects have a longer memory than do humans.
B.) Given my
subject for the fourth animation assignment, I did a youtube search for Batman: The Animated Series. I found another interesting mashup. Someone took the audio from the Dark Knight Rises Theatrical trailer and
used footage from Batman: The Animated
Series.
This mashup is an example of developmental animation. It features the trends of orthodox animation,
but is experimental in its juxtaposition of subject matter.
C) I have a
rough draft of my final paper completed.
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